Romans 9:6-13

God's Sovereign Choice
6 It is not as though God's word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. 7 Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham's children. On the contrary, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." [b] 8 In other words, it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring. 9 For this was how the promise was stated: "At the appointed time I will return, and Sarah will have a son." [c]

10 Not only that, but Rebekah's children were conceived at the same time by our father Isaac. 11 Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: 12 not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." [d] 13 Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." [e]


Dig Deeper
Every now and then, as I’m driving along somewhere, I’ll see some older folks with bumper stickers that read “I’m spending my children’s inheritance.” Those bumper stickers have always made me laugh a little bit. The point of them being that they are busy spending and enjoying as much of their savings as they can before they die and leave what they have left to their children. It’s probably amusing because we are not a culture that’s really built on inheritances. We certainly have them and some people leave rather large inheritances to their children but many don’t leave much at all, and certainly, most people don’t really expect or plan their life around receiving a large legacy from their parents. In the ancient Jewish world, though, inheritances were a very important way of life and there was a very specific protocol that was normally expected to be followed. In fact it was the norm that sons would live with their fathers until their fathers died and they received the inheritance that they were promised. It was also the normally expected run of things that the oldest son would receive a much bigger portion of the inheritance than the other sons. Daughters would not really receive an inheritance at all from their father because it was expected that they would get married.

The section which runs for the remainder of this chapter and through chapters 10 and 11 would probably seem much less mysterious and difficult if we were a culture that better understood family, covenant, and inheritance language. Because we don’t readily recognize and understand that sort of language many people have read chapters 9-11 and come up with some interesting interpretations ranging from individual predestination doctrines to the idea that God will actually provide salvation for ethnic Israel apart from being in Christ solely because they are Israel. We will point out some of those mis-readings as we encounter them but we will be much more likely to follow Paul’s train of thought if we recall that he is writing to demonstrate God’s covenant faithfulness through the Messiah. He wants to show how the one covenant family through whom the world would be blessed and sin would be dealt with has come to those who have faith in the life of the Messiah. Now, though, he needs to explain how this actually fulfills God’s original covenant promises rather than demonstrating that God has backed out on his promise to Israel. If we keep that in mind as Paul’s intentions, we will be on much firmer ground as we begin to wade through the next three chapters.

Verse 6 demonstrates that Paul’s primary concern here is dealing with defending God’s righteousness despite the seeming problem that a vast majority of Paul’s countrymen have not responded to the gospel message with faith in the Messiah. Paul began this chapter with a lament that the Jews were not responding to the gospel in the numbers he had hoped and realizes that this opens up Paul to the charge that if his gospel message is indeed true and faith in the Messiah is how one enters into adoption as the covenant family of God then God has not been faithful to his promises to Israel. But, says Paul that cannot be. There is simply no room in Paul’s mind, or any faithful Jew in the first century for that matter, for the possibility that God’s word had failed. If one’s interpretation of the facts seem to lead to the conclusion that Goad has failed to live up to his promises, then the problem is in the interpretation, not with God’s word. Perhaps Paul had Isaiah’s writings echoing in his mind, “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10-11).

The problem with the typical Jewish thought that Paul is opposing here is displayed in John 8 as Jesus charged the Jews with not truly being the spiritual children of Abraham as demonstrated by their actions in seeking his death and the Jews responded by ranting that Abraham was their father and that they were not illegitimate children (Jn. 8:34-47). They thought that they were part of Abraham’s covenant family simply because they had descended from Abraham. But says, Paul, “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.” The TNIV changes the wording in verse 7 from the original language and in the process loses some of Paul’s point. His actual point is that just because they are Abraham’s children does not mean they are all his seed. “Seed” is the word used in the Bible to often denote family, especially in the context of inheritance and covenant and keeps in line with God’s promise in Genesis 3:15 to crush the serpent through the seed of a woman. The point is that the assumption that all descendants of Abraham are automatically members of the covenant family is an incorrect assumption, one that is vitally important to understand.

One need look no further than the two important examples that Paul gives from the book of Genesis itself to make his point. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, but only Isaac would be part of the covenant family. Ishmael would have descendants but they were not part of the covenant family of Israel. Isaac was the child of promise through whom the covenant promises would pass. Indeed one need simply read the Genesis account to see that the flow of the narrative follows Isaac as part of the covenant family while Ishmael disappears into the folds of the fabric of history.

It might be easy, though, for someone to object to that example, claiming that obviously Ishmael was not part of the promise because his mother, Hagar, was not rightly married to Abraham and so Ishmael’s birth was clearly not part of God’s plan. So, Paul shows another example that blows that possible opposition out of the water. Isaac had twin brothers that were both born to him and his wife Rebekah. Even before they were born God declared that the covenant promises would uncharacteristically pass through the younger son rather than the older. This was not because Esau had someone grown up and disqualified himself from the covenant (although his adult behavior would demonstrate that he certainly did not value the covenant inheritance). No, Paul heads off that argument as well. God simply, out of his grace and according to his covenant purposes, chose Jacob not Esau. The covenant would again pass to one of Abraham’s descendants but not the other, through no fault of his own, although as we just saw his later character in life would perhaps demonstrate why God did not choose Esau. It is also true that in once again choosing one descendant through whom to pass the promise, God was foreshadowing what he would do in Jesus Christ, which is where Paul is heading with this argument—that just as the family promises passed through part of Abraham’s descendants but not all, this is exactly what God has done with the Messiah. The covenant promises have passed through the Messiah part of the family alone.

This mention of Jacob and Esau, including Paul’s quotation from Malachi 1, is often used to make the argument that this passage was written by Paul to demonstrate that God has predestined some humans for the purposes of his salvation and others for eternal separation and damnation. To get to that conclusion, however, one must forget that Paul has been and continues here to think in terms of people groups not individuals. He uses the individuals, Jacob and Esau, to demonstrate the point he is making about his people. The second thing that we must remember is that Paul is making a point about the covenant family using common Jewish inheritance language. In the context of inheritance language, “love” meant to embrace into the inheritance while “hate” meant to reject from the inheritance (see Mal. 1; see also if that doesn’t help make a bit more sense to Luke 14:26). Thus, Paul’s point is not that God had already determined that Esau would be damned before he was born. This view would raise several other theological problems, but the one to focus on here is that this interpretation would make little sense in the overall context of Paul’s argument thus far. No, Paul has not made some strange sidestep into a conversation about predestination of individuals that would have little to do with what he has been saying up to this point in the letter. Rather, his point is that God embraced Jacob as part o the covenant family of promise but the promise would not be passed to Esau and his descendants. Paul has, therefore, brilliantly laid the ground work to explain God’s faithfulness in that even though Israel has not embraced the gospel and the covenant family has been entrusted to the Messiah, God has come through on his promises.


Devotional Thought
Do you truly believe that God’s word does not fail? Is that a firm conviction in your life despite the way things seem sometime? What do you do when you start to struggle with that conviction? In what area of your life are you currently struggling with living out the reality that God’s word never fails?